by Diana Dwayne
“Us,” Nicolette interjects again.
“Yeah,” Sam says, “whatever.”
I smile as she pulls away. “I’ll do that.” I’m not sure if I mean it or not, but I’ll figure it out eventually.
“Now get on outta here, ‘fore they change they minds,” she says.
“It’s been known to happen,” Nicolette says, still sitting on her bunk.
“Thanks,” I say.
With that, I’m quickly out the door and on my way to freedom. It’s the most beautiful moment of my life.
* * *
James is there when I walk out, but Jillian insists that I ride with her. It’s hard to think that it’s been less than twenty-four hours. I’m sure I’m just being melodramatic, but it really does feel like things have changed since I was put in jail. Hopefully, the hard part is over.
“You got lucky,” Jillian says as we pull away from the jail. “I mean, really lucky.”
“I had the truth on my side,” I say, joyfully looking out the window as the jail fades into the distance. “I don’t think that luck had anything to do with it.”
“Usually it’s the ones who are telling the truth that end up getting the worst of it,” Jillian says and lights up a cigarette. She glances over at me. “For your sake though,” she says, “I’m glad things turned out the way that they did.”
“Thanks,” I say. We come out of the DMZ and are finally back in civilization. Something’s bothering me though. “What happened? I mean, they had Melissa’s testimony that I had gone back into the office—which I never did, by the way.”
“Yeah,” Jillian says, flicking her cigarette into the half-full ashtray, “turns out she has a history of telling stories.”
“Telling stories?” I ask. “What do you mean?”
“She’s a Munchausen’s case,” Jillian says. “I mean, that sort of thing only really has to do with medical issues, but I guess your coworker went a little crazy with it after they locked you up.”
“How so?” I ask, not sure why I’m trying to be sneaky as I start inching my fingers toward Jillian’s cigarettes.
She notices what I’m doing without so much as glancing away from the road. She swiftly slaps my wrist, saying, “You’re not a smoker, and I’ll be damned if I let your brother know that you started because I wasn’t policing my pack.”
“Ow,” I say, pulling my hand back. “I’m not planning on making a habit of it, I’m just glad to be free, you know?”
“I don’t think anyone ever picks up their first cigarette and says, ‘I’m going to make a habit of this.’ It’s a drug, Rose. The shit’s more addictive than heroin.”
“Is that true?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve heard reports both ways.”
“What did Melissa say that made them stop trusting her?”
“It started out with a few embellishments,” Jillian says, blowing the smoke out of the corner of her mouth while she’s talking. It’s quite possibly the most fascinating action that I’ve ever seen.
“Like what?” I ask, wondering why I’m being made to pry this information out of my own lawyer.
“Well,” she says, ashing again, “at first, she said that you just went into the office for a minute, then came back out and walked to the elevator. Then she said that when you were walking to the elevator, you seemed really upset about something. Then she said that you walked into the office carrying a knife in your hand. Then she started saying that she could have sworn that she heard you yelling while you were in there.”
“A knife? Wow—” I start to respond, but Jillian continues.
“Then she said that she saw blood on your hands after you came out.” She snuffs out her cigarette, but it’s still smoking. It makes me a little nervous, but doesn’t seem to bother Jillian in the slightest as she lights up another one. “I think the one that finally did it was when she called the detective and told him that you came to her desk right before you went in there, saying that he had to pay for treating you that way, then took a knife from your purse and only then went into the office to do the deed.”
“Is she okay?”
Jillian glances at me. “The woman put you in jail,” she says. “What do you care?”
“She’s obviously very ill,” I respond, glad to see that my time on the inside hasn’t changed my disposition that much. “I just hope that she can get the help that she needs, that’s all.”
“I think that just might happen,” Jillian says, turning onto my street. It’s funny. I had never realized that James lives so close to the jail. I mean, it’s about ten miles, but still.
“What do you mean?”
“When the detective intimated that he didn’t believe her, she went down to the station.”
“Oh jeez,” I say.
Jillian chortles smoke through her nostrils and mutters, “Girl wants to steal one of my cigarettes and can’t even use a proper expletive.” She parks in front of the house as James pulls into the driveway. I don’t really know why, but I had kind of expected there to be camera crews or something on my lawn. “She went down there and started screaming at the detective,” she says as she puts the car into park. “I guess it was about the time that she started saying that she saw you do it that the detective really felt the need to look into her credibility as a witness. Apparently, she has none.”
“Huh,” I say. I want to elucidate the monosyllabic utterance, but there’s nothing else that I can think to follow it.
“Yep,” Jillian says. “So, I think you were really unlucky to have her as a coworker, but really lucky that she was so close to cracking as it was that it only took a little bit of disbelief on the part of the detective to make her unravel.”
“Huh,” I say again, and I swear there are more words to my vernacular; they just seem to be eluding me at the moment. “How’s James?” I ask, not so much because I’m expecting an answer, more than anything, I’m asking Jillian’s permission to go to him.
She smiles. “Why don’t you go ask him yourself,” she says, flicking her cigarette into the ash tray as I open my car door.
Chapter Seven
Home Again
It’s barely after noon, but I’m already starting to feel tired again. I don’t know if it’s the stress of the whole ordeal or what, but James is very understanding when I ask if I can take a nap in his bed.
By the time I wake up, it’s nearly dark. I walk downstairs to find not only James, but every one of my siblings in the front room.
“There she is,” Andrew says, lifting up a glass filled with what, from the looks of it, can’t be his first beer of the evening.
My brothers are, in descending order of age, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Andrew and Simon. The fact that I’ve chosen a man named James only helps to round out the apostle theme that my parents had apparently gone for. The funny thing—well, apart from the fact that my brothers are named after biblical characters, and I’m named after a role that Betty White played—something I’ve always found a little curious is that my parents are about the least religious people that I know. I once asked them why they named all of my brothers after apostles, and they didn’t seem to realize that they had done it. My dad simply said, “We just liked the names.”
They’re all here. Well, my brothers, their spouses and my parents, anyway. Usually, I’m more than a little ill-at-ease when I’m around my whole family, but right now, I’m just happy to see all of them.
James comes in from the kitchen, obviously a little stressed at having to cook for so many people and having no cooking skills to call upon whatsoever. “Does anyone know how to braise something?” he asks, then follows the gaze of everyone else in the room. “Rose!” he calls and runs up to the landing where I’m standing. “How are you feeling?”
“You know,” I say, “I’m feeling all right.”
The evening is filled with talking and babies crying and I can’t get enough of it. For a while there, I was really starting to think t
hat I would never see any of these people again without a sheet of bulletproof glass between us. That thought feels a little melodramatic, but the fact of the matter is: I was arrested for murder yesterday.
The kitchen is a chaotic mess when I follow James in to see what he’s fixing up for dinner. He tells me that he’s okay, that he’s not overwhelmed and that he’s certain that he can handle cooking for so many people. The problem is that I didn’t ask. So, after I finally take over the chore of cooking for what amounts to fifteen hungry people, things go a lot more smoothly.
The menu is simple, but there’s more than enough food to feed the mob. It’s the Pearson way of cooking. “Other families may serve fancier dinners,” my mother always used to say, “but they don’t have seven kids and a husband to feed every night.” It’s about an hour of stress and delegation before dinner is finally ready. As I start bringing out plate after plate of grilled chicken, salad, potatoes, green beans and bread, I start to feel bad for my mother. The poor woman had to do this for years.
We finally gather around the table which, at the moment, is little more than the serving area as there are nowhere near enough seats for everyone. I find a spot on one of the steps leading from the upstairs to the living room, and everyone else somehow finds a place to be. Maybe they’re not all sitting, but that’s nothing unusual.
“So,” Luke says through a mouth half-full of chicken, “did you make any friends in jail?”
“Luke!” my mom, Darla, scolds.
He holds up his hands and is already laughing at what he’s about to say. “I was just wondering if she could tell us all whether she met any nice people in there.” He sighs, trying to keep a straight face. “I hear they have wicked pillow fights in the joint.”
Most of my family just ignores him. He kind of has that effect on people. It’s not that he can’t take anything seriously; it’s more that he knowingly and willingly refuses to. “No,” I respond, “I did not have a pillow fight in jail. Could you pass the beans?”
He smiles and walks over to the table. As he’s bringing me the beans, he smiles again and says, “So, you didn’t have a prison wife? I thought that was common courtesy.”
“There were an odd number of us at the time,” I say, taking a spoonful from the dish and placing its contents on my plate. “Maybe if I’d been in there longer, but those are the breaks.” I’ve found the most effective way of getting Luke to stop teasing is to play along.
“Ah,” he says, scrambling for a comeback, but not finding one. He walks the beans back to the table and resumes his spot close enough to the chicken to make sure he’s the first to get seconds should the situation turn hostile.
“You know,” Jordan, Matthew’s wife, says, “I heard that almost fifty percent of inmates are wrongfully accused. Is that true?”
I guess she’s asking me. “I wouldn’t know,” I say. “Again, maybe if I’d been in there a while longer, they would have gone over it at orientation.”
Jordan’s a lot of things: she’s a great mother, she’s an extremely over-protective mother and she’s an overbearing know-it-all when it comes to matters of children, motherhood, parenthood and other child-related matters. She’s also extremely gullible when it comes to just about everything else. “I didn’t know they had orientation in jail,” she says. “Do they have like a video and everything?”
Half of the people in the room are chuckling under their breath, but I simply respond with, “I had court this morning, so I had to miss it.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m always this snarky; I’ve just learned how to get through a family occasion without wanting to shoot myself. Or them. The order on that changes depending on my mood. I’ve heard that’s a common sentiment.
The rest of dinner is a lot of the usual: everyone talks over each other while Simon and Beth sit in one corner, watching everyone else, wondering if anyone can pick up on the fact that they’re stoned. Spoiler alert: we can, we just don’t care.
By the time that dinner is over, Matthew and Jordan make their quick exit; their usual excuse that having three kids entitles them to leave any function as soon as possible. As they’re leaving, Luke, Molly, John and Alice also pack up their kids and hit the road, leaving me with only a full room to deal with as opposed to the clown car that my family events usually end up being.
“So,” Mark says, “just out of curiosity, did you actually kill the guy or not?”
Let me tell you a little bit about Mark. Well, I guess there are only two things that you really need to know about him, other than the fact that he’s married to a woman named Sarah who had gone to high school with Jordan. He’s a venture capitalist who can always be found checking the stock market via the ticker app on his phone, and he’s kind of an asshole.
I don’t generally like to use such brash terms, but there doesn’t seem to be another that quite fits him. He’s the kind of guy who’s been taught by years of bad reactions to keep his mouth shut most of the time. The problem is that the small percentage of the time that he does open his mouth, you can generally expect something rather blunt and unsavory to come out.
“Mark!” my mother scolds. I love the woman, but sharply intoning the name of one of her errant children hasn’t really been very effective since we were kids.
“I’m sorry,” he says, very much the child being forced to apologize to someone after a rude question. “What I meant to say was, I’ll love you no matter what the answer to the following question is.” He looks at my mom, then at me. Simon and Beth are having a very difficult time keeping their hushed giggles to themselves. “Did you kill the guy?”
I stand and move from the steps to the chair across from where he’s sitting with Sarah. Don’t worry; there won’t be a test on this later. “Mark, how can you ask me that?” I respond.
“Well, someone’s suspected for murder, it’s the first question that naturally comes to mind,” he answers as his wife just glares at me. Ah, Sarah. If you think Mark is bad, you’ll find Sarah to be more than a little frightening.
“No,” I say, “I would never hurt anyone. Mr. McDaniel may not have been the nicest boss on the planet, but that doesn’t mean that I wanted him dead.”
My mother does a quick headcount to make sure that all of my siblings with children have gone, and then she focuses her attention on me, obviously interested in the answer herself.
“So, why’d they arrest you?” Sarah asks.
“I’d like a beer, would anyone else like a beer?” James asks. It’s so funny, back in high school, he seemed invincible. Now, he gets so uncomfortable around my family. Well, not my family in general, I guess. It’s mostly just Mark and Sarah that drive my future husband to the bottle.
“One of my coworkers told the detective that she saw me go into his office after he let me off for the day, and that the only other person to so much as approach it was the woman who found him,” I answer.
Nobody’s taken James up on his offer, but that’s not going to stop him from drinking. A wicked little smile comes over Sarah’s face, a rarity, and usually not a good sign. “So you were the last one to see him alive?” she asks.
“I would imagine that the person who jabbed an icepick into his neck was the last person to see him alive, Sarah, but thank you for the implication.” The best way to deal with Sarah is to... Well, the best way to deal with Sarah is to not have to deal with Sarah. She’s a tattoo artist, and I’m not entirely convinced that she didn’t go into that particular field so she could get paid to gouge people with needles.
“Now kids,” my dad, Ian, starts. “I don’t really think that this is appropriate conversation. The fact of the matter is that our Rose is home now, and I don’t think we need to go any further than that with this conversation. Why can’t we all just sit back and enjoy each other’s company?”
My dad is a child of the sixties. It’s not that he was involved in any sort of activism or anything like that; he was born in the sixties. He’s always seemed
to be a little perturbed at the fact that he didn’t get to drop acid with Hendrix. Mix that with a love of contact sports and that’s my dad.
Sarah laughs. It’s a hideous sound that I can only equate to nails being run over a chalkboard. Of course, the nails going over the chalkboard wouldn’t belong to her; they’d be from a hand that she’s recently severed.
“What do you think about all of this, Simon?” Mark asks, not so much in hopes of an answer, more for the joy of watching his youngest brother squirm at having to say something in front of his family while he’s so clearly baked.
“I don’t,” he starts then looks at Beth. “Well, you can’t think that Rose would ever hurt anybody. She just doesn’t have it in her.”
“What,” Sarah says, largely out of context, “and you do?”
“Not like you,” Simon says. His eyes quickly go wide as he realizes that he’s let something slip. Now he’s going to spend the next five to ten minutes tripping out about whether or not we heard him. He shrivels into himself as Beth comforts him in a tone so quiet it doesn’t really look like she’s talking. I know why my dad is okay with Simon smoking pot, but my mom? I don’t know, maybe she really is that naïve.
Sarah just laughs. Her objective has been achieved.
James comes back with a half-empty beer in his hand. “So, how are we all doing out here? Does anyone want dessert?”
Mark shoots him a quick look, and before his eyes are back on me, James is already heading back into the kitchen in search of something stronger. I chuckle to myself. My poor baby.
“You think it’s funny?” Mark asks. “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to get you an interview with Rory McDaniel? Sure, the guy was an asshole, but he was one of the biggest guys in the business.”
“I’m sorry to have put you out by working for a man who got murdered,” I respond, hoping that James gets my telepathic message that I want him to bring me a beer on his way back; if he ever does come back.
“Well,” Mark says, “the next job’s all on you, sis. I’m not sticking my neck out like that again. Do you have any idea what it was like going to the office today with everyone thinking that my little sister killed Rory McDaniel?”
